The historic change is “intended to balance population development and address the challenge of an aging population”.
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Xinhua said the proposal needs to be approved by China’s top legislature before it can be enacted.
Desperate attempts by China to curb population growth in 1979 led the communist authorities to offer couples condoms, coils, sterilisation and financial rewards so they stuck to the rigid one-child policy.
China will officially end its longstanding one-child policy and allow couples to have two children, state media reported.
In the West and in many parts of China, the policy’s implementation was criticized as overly harsh and even inhumane, with those who violated the rules subject to forced abortions and sterilizations and penalties including fines, harassment or the loss of their jobs. The ramifications of such a totalitarian restriction on life might have been predictable, but weren’t immediately visible until this most recent generation, when China found itself with 50 million more men than women.
China’s surprise decision to scrap its long-standing “one-child” policy might seem likely to open the floodgates of a demographic deluge, but researchers who track population say it actually won’t make a huge difference over the next few decades, to China or the wider world. Still, at roughly 1.35 billion, China’s current population is the largest in the world. In reality, the one-child law was never enforced uniformly and seems to have applied most strictly in rural rather than urban areas.
The one-child policy was introduced as a way to alleviate the country’s economic, social and environmental pressures that were being caused by a growing population.
Other Asian countries such as Thailand have also had low fertility without a one-child policy and “have not seen a rapid fertility increase”, he added.
John Kennedy, associate professor of political science and director of KU’s Center for Global and worldwide Studies, is available to comment on the one-child policy, family planning in China and issues with the country’s census data and demographics.
“There are just too many constraints in terms of housing and education for most Chinese couples to have more than two children”, says Gerland.
“The state has no business regulating how many children people have”, he said.
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Last year, there were 916 million people between the ages of 16 and 59 in China, roughly 66 per cent of the entire population. The restrictions went into effect in cities, but in the countryside, many families continued having two or more children.
